10 September 2010

HDC 2010–In the Books

For the past three days, the Heartland Developers Conference has been in full swing.  The first day was comprised entirely of hands-on classes (eight choices all together) while the remaining two days consisted of 45 sessions, 4 keynotes, and 2 receptions/after parties.  All this for a steal at $250 (plus a little extra if you signed up for any of the 1st day classes)!  Needless to say, Joe Olsen has once again put on a great conference.

I attended several sessions over the past couple of days and there was some great information to be consumed presented by some great speakers.  My personal favorite, other than my own session of course Smile, was the Windows Phone 7 “Deep Dive” session by Jeff Brand.

Russ Wagner and I had the privilege to present on “Generating Quality Software: A Look at Visual Studio 2010 Testing Tools”.  Overall, the session seemed to go very well – especially since we were in the final time slot for the conference (just prior to the closing keynote and giveaways!).  We were constrained to 45 minutes so we had to pack a lot of information into a short amount of time.  Due to the time constraints, we decided to try something a little different… We utilized a second projector to display the PowerPoint slides on while we demonstrated various features on the main screen.  This allowed us to focus on the demonstrations while still allowing the audience to review the various feature highlights contained within the slide deck.

If you missed our session and would like a chance to see it, we will be presenting an extended version of today’s session at the next Omaha Team System User Group meeting (where we’re not constrained to 45 minutes).  You can also view the session’s slide deck here.

For all those who traveled for the conference, have a safe trip home and we hope to see you again next year!